SEA STATE

An English ex-journalist’s account of how sex and class intertwined in an interview project that plunged her into the hostile world of the offshore oil industry.

When Lasley traveled to Aberdeen from London, she had one goal: to write about life on oil rigs and “see what men [were] like with no women around.” Her motivations were complex. She lost a book she was writing on oil rigs when her laptop was stolen from an apartment she shared with an abusive man she had tried to leave two times before. Her first interview subject was Caden, a married offshore oil rigger Lasley met as soon as she arrived. The attraction was immediate and powerful, and the two began an affair as the author started her research. The process of oil extraction, writes Lasley, involves a “pitched battle among human ingenuity, inhospitable terrain and highly combustible materials. The dangers are compounded by the locations’ remoteness.” Disasters, such as the Piper Alpha explosion in the North Sea in 1988, left many men traumatized. Yet working-class men continued to seek work on oil rigs because the onshore heavy-industry jobs on which they could count had all but disappeared. As Lasley discovered in her brief affair with Caden, offshore work culture created “antifemale paranoia” toward “women who ‘trapped’ them with pregnancy, spirited children away over borders…[and] pauperized them in divorce settlements.” Unlike the middle-class and educated author, other women on shore did not have the independent means to start their lives anew. Onshore jobs were as scarce for them as they were for men, and few women were willing to work on the rigs. In poetically hard-edged prose, Lasley explores offshore rigging culture and the anti–workers’ rights culture that created it. She also shows how the hypermuscular capitalism in which it is entrenched deforms, and often destroys, relationships.

A raw, bold, unsparing memoir.